Web3 Leader Spotlight: Paritosh Gupta
This week, we caught up with Paritosh Gupta, Co-Founder & CTO at Olive, a multi-chain DeFi protocol that combines composability with structured products to amplify yields without exposing users' funds to principal or credit risks. We discuss why engineers should consider getting involved in web3, as well as security best practices & how DeFi can provide greater access to financial services for underserved communities.
You've previously founded and run a number of successful start-ups, why did you shift your attention to web3?
As a long-time enthusiast of platforms like FOSS, Reddit and Wikipedia, I have been drawn to the ethos of decentralisation and community governance that these platforms embody. This has naturally led me to take an interest in Web 3.0 projects and platforms. Web 3.0 extends beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies and blockchains to include any technology that empowers users with greater control over their digital lives. While Web 2.0 was designed around the concept of fostering connections between people, Web 3.0 is being sculpted with principles of decentralisation, permissionless access, financial inclusivity, and individual control over digital identities. This marks an incredibly exciting opportunity to build.
What did you do to ensure the security & reliability of Olive?
"Do the right thing on the top line, the bottom line will follow" - This philosophy, originally coined by Steve Jobs, has shaped my leadership style, effectively fostering an innovative and open company culture to deliver on speed, security and reliability. Following are fundamental key considerations which we made to build Olive.
Cultivating an Awareness-Driven Culture: Prioritising people in our approach breeds open communication, nurtures creative liberty, and establishes clear guidelines. It enlarges the scope for improved productivity, learning-oriented environment, and a builder's mindset.
Implementing Thorough Testing Measures: Robust testing practices instil a sense of assurance within the team to deploy code and facilitate swift collaboration. We have managed to maintain a balanced relationship between manual and automated QA processes, using a range of techniques to rigorously test our smart contracts and codebase. This includes end-to-end (E2E) testing, integration testing, and fuzz testing.
Pursuing Expert Code Reviews: Ensuring that our smart contracts are impervious to tampering is paramount, hence, audits are a fundamental component of our blockchain project's security protocol. We collaborated with seasoned security auditors of high repute to scrutinize our code and mitigate possible risks.
Adopting Secure Deployment and Configuration Practices: As software and systems development practices evolve, becoming more automated and integrated, it is crucial to institute preventative and detective controls. These can help identify irregularities within the organization and prevent potential security breaches through programmatic constraints (policies) and architectural design. This includes control policies, key and secret management, networking, virtual private networks (VPNs), and logging.
Continuous Learning: Lastly, it's vital to remain open to learning, drawing insights from analytical reports, whitepapers, and repositories.
What advice would you give to individuals or organisations looking to get involved in the DeFi ecosystem?
Consistency is the key to grow as individual or organisation in web3. This ecosystem is lead by communities, there are lots of great communities out there where you can learn more about Web3 culture and get involved with other like-minded individuals to begin with. Better infrastructure and more transparency are key to deFi's future, do your research and investigate the individual project as much as possible before using their product. Use tools like DefiLlama, DeBank, Nansen, Dune, Bubblemaps etc to stay ahead of the curve.
How can DeFi help promote financial inclusion and provide greater access to financial services for underserved communities?
Currently consumers with poor credit histories and low incomes are not adequately served. They face systematic denial to financial access, frequently due to bias and discrimination. It's critical to include these individuals in the financial ecosystem to stimulate economic growth, alleviate poverty and inequality, and foster a more balanced and inclusive financial structure.
Decentralised finance, or DeFi, stands for the idea of making finance open to everyone without the need for middlemen who seek to profit. It introduces new opportunities in the peer-to-peer network, like sending money to someone in another country or getting access to new ways of investing money. This helps bring value to more people and places. With DeFi microfinance and digital identities, people who need loans can get them at a reasonable cost, while those who lend money can get fair returns.
Smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code, make the loan process transparent and automated, which reduces fraud and corruption. Also, by using tokenization (turning assets into digital tokens) and fractional ownership (allowing multiple people to own a part of something), investing and managing money can be made more open and clear. This allows more people, even those who previously couldn't afford, to invest in assets. With adoption of DeFi, we can help build a more equitable and prosperous world for all.
